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NAS Reviews

The 5big Network is a diskful hot-swap five-drive NAS primarily focused on file storage and backup. It comes in 2.5, 5 and 7.5 TB capacities and can be configured in RAID 0, 5, 5+ spare, 6, 6+ spare and 10+ spare single volumes.

Power consumption is 43 W and there is no idle disk spin down mode or programmable shutdown and startup. Fan and drive noise is low, meaning the NAS is barely audible in a quiet room.

CIFS/SMB and AFP and network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. There are no media or print services available, nor is UPS automatic shutdown supported via USB. But BitTorrent download is supported, as is Wake on Lan.

One USB 2.0 and three eSATA ports support external storage expansion and push-button file copy from flash or USB drives. Immediate and daily/weekly/monthly scheduled backups can also be done to/from attached drives. But backup to networked shares is not supported.

Performance is similar to other "Orion" based RAID 5 NASes. RAID 5 writes with a gigabit LAN connection averaged 12.8 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB. RAID 5 reads tested under the same conditions did much better, averaging 25.3 MB/s.